Actian Corp and Pervasive Software Inc today announced that the two companies have entered into a merger agreement with Actian to acquire all of Pervasive’s outstanding shares for $9.20 per share.

The deal values Pervasive at $161.9m and is aimed at improving Actian’s real-time data provision.

CEO and president of Actian Steve Shine said: “Big data is an opportunity and a challenge for organizations in every industry, with potentially valuable business critical insight locked away in inaccessible and indecipherable systems.

“This makes data management and insight today’s big question for businesses looking at how to unlock the substantial incremental business value in their big data.

“This transaction combines the proven ability of both companies to out-innovate and out-perform the industry giants allowing us to deliver the promise of big data to every organization.”

“There is a lot of industry discussion around the big data challenge. This debate essentially boils down to how organizations extract business value from data in a way that is powerful yet simple.

“We want to give customers the tools to get to the data, find those nuggets of insight and act on it immediately. Would an e-tailer benefit from knowing the social preferences for those in his on-line store or from real-time alerts from a price comparison site for items in stock?

“The Actian and Pervasive merger allows us to bring this and countless other data driven benefits to the market in a way that enables every business to create compelling business outcomes from the promise of big data.”

Actian’s Vectorwise currently holds multiple records for performance and they claim it is fast becoming the analytic platform of choice for digital companies.

Pervasive’s Data Rush and Data Cloud products have also been critically acclaimed by the industry.

“Together, the combined group has the technology and global presence to deliver the ability to extract, analyse and take action on big data in real time,” added Shine.

“Every organization can now act on real insights to take action on big data.”